365 বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ চতুর্দশ খন্ড শিরোনাম সূত্র তারিখ ১৪৯। পাকিস্তান : কথা বলার সময় সানডে টাইমস ১৮ এপ্রিল, ১৯৭১ এসেছে THE SUNDAYTIMES, APRIL 18, 1971 PAKISTAN: A TIME TO SPEAK OUT In the last two issues of The Sunday Times, we have published graphic dispatches from our special correspondent in East Pakistan. These have borne out, and added to, the mass of evidence from other sources, all of it suggesting that a terrible, communal bloodbath has been the result of the West Pakistan decision to quell with bullets the democratically expressed wish of East Pakistan Bengalis for a wide measure of autonomy. On the opposite page, the same correspondent, after visiting West Pakistan, describes the influences and ideas at work there. What emerges, with a force that leaves no room for doubt, is that an appalling error has led to an appalling tragedy. The Indian sub-continent has, unhappily, been witness before now to mass killings by one race of another. But there is no modem precedent in the sub-continent, or elsewhere, for what can only be regarded as the deliberate intention on the part of the central Pakistani Government to wipe out, by killing, as many as possible of the adherents, present and future, of Bengali nationalism. General Yahya Khan, to do him justice, had a very difficult situation on his hands. It was due to his own, laudable, desire to see democracy restored in Pakistan that general elections took place last autumn, from which Sheikh Mujib and his East Pakistani Awami League emerged triumphant. Faced subsequently with the swelling tide of Bengali separatism, Yahya Khan's duty, as Head of State, was clearly to seek to preserve the unity of the State. But Mujib, in the negotiations which preceded the final break, had never proposed secession whatever his more fiery followers were shouting. Nor was it ever conceivable, the whatever present successes of West Pakistani forces, that a display of military strength could snuff out (and keep snuffed out) years of Bengali grievance and longing for a new deal. The one certain result of Yahya Khan's fateful decision-other than bloodshed is that the way has now been opened, in East Pakistan, to Maoists. Naxalites and other fishers in troubled waters besides whom Mujib stands out as the epitome of reasonableness. A deplorable cloud of complacency now seems to be hanging over Islamabad. It is the duty of other governments, the British Government included, to help to dispel it. To say that the East Pakistani drama is an internal affair." as Sir Alec Douglas Home has done, is not enough. Internal affairs can become, as this one has, crimes against justice and humanity. Besides, with India, China, and Russia all with an iron in the fire it is ludicrous to pretend that East Pakistan is a little local difficulty. The time has come, it is indeed overdue, for the British Government publicly to express its disgust, in far stronger terms than it has yet done, at the course of events in East Pakistan. Using the more traditional, and private, diplomatic channel, it needs to let
